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While recovering from a lovely case of English flu that my wife thoughtfully smuggled through customs for me (I was hoping for an antique 5-weight Hardy rod!), I found I had plenty of time to work through a pile of books I had collected. Among them was a new book that my RV Life editor had sent down for me to review. I really hadn’t read much of the author’s work, but John Bailey’s book, 50 Fish to Catch In Your Lifetime, has an interesting premise.
When you think of “lifetime fish,” what comes to mind? I enjoy many different kinds of fishing, some not very highbrow stuff, but what fishery is worthy of a top fifty designation?
A couple of them are probably given. Everybody, even thousands of people who may have never seen one, would give a vote to steelhead. They are beautiful, big and explosive, can be plenty challenging to catch, are great to eat, and have a rabid following. Most of your salmon, Atlantic or Pacific, are in the same boat (or stream!). Chinook, coho and on down the line all rate a good look. But given the whole world to chose, how would you know?
To make much sense of it, you’d sure need to travel a lot more than I do. To do it right would involve trips to Australia, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and many other venues. There are wondrous and exotic fish everywhere. To set up a good rating system, you’d have to really put in a lot of time and effort. But how did Mr. Bailey make his decisions?
Now in fairness, he has done a lot of guiding and fishing around the world. He has left his base in England and explored a lot of intriguing waters he shares with the reader. In addition, he invited prose from a fine selection of friends who have taken a fish or two that he put on the list. Some of the fish are wildly exotic, and he displays all in a collection of fine photos and graphic drawings. But I had to chuckle at the bulk of his fifty-fish lineup.
Taking Inventory
Now I’ll give you that fifty is a lot of different types of fish. I had to sit down and start my own little list, just to see if I’d even caught fifty varieties in my lifetime. It was a bit like listing past cars I’d owned, dogs I’d raised, girls who’d left me, and other fading memories; a lot of dust to blow off the clouded cerebrum. But after I dug up some photos from a college-era trip to Mexico and reviewed journals from my trips out in the Pacific to catch rockfish species, plus visits to waters in Alaska and off the coast near New Orleans, I was able to sneak the number up into the very low three figures.
A lot of those were incidental catch or bait stealers, fish that would be on no one’s “must catch list.” But Mr. Bailey didn’t seem to limit his fish to high-grade ones either. True enough, exotics like golden dorado, barramundi and mahseer were on the list, as were several fish that are big, hard to find, rare and great fighters. But to fill out the fish on his dream team, he listed every wet, scaly critter that might be found in his home stream. The list came right out of Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler! Right next to the exotics of the world were lowly river eels, chub and even the humble stickleback. The teeny stickleback, with a “dream length” of four inches, isn’t even good bait, let alone a creature of memories, great fight or wonderful dining!
Those good old chalk streams of legend do have some great fish. Most feature brown trout (which he lists three times: those in rivers, those in lakes, and those that go to sea and return!), Atlantic salmon and pike. But they also have a bunch of species of “rough or coarse fish” that really don’t have much to be said for them. Carp, tench, roach, chub, rudd, dace, bream and mullet fall into the category of sucker-like kinds of fish, things that a lot of folks would throw back in the water or, all too often, up on the bank! A worm is the most exotic bait required and most would likely rise to a floating chunk of jelly sandwich! Hey, I’m not saying I wouldn’t fish for them, or maybe even write about the experience, but putting them in my top fifty, along with sailfish and tarpon (which I also haven’t caught, yet), would be unlikely.
Better than Stickleback
What comparable species could I catch in my favorite stream? Well, I’ve got at least a couple of different species of ugly little sculpin to throw in, three varieties of sucker, lamprey, (yuck!), carp, (they are everywhere) and squawfish (swimming around with a bounty on their scaly heads). I can also add bullhead catfish, yellow perch, and black bass (all of which he includes), and a few species of panfish such as bluegill and black and white crappie (which I probably wouldn’t include but are a darned sight better than stickleback, which we also have). Down toward the Columbia, my stream carries sturgeon, white and green, along with the cutthroat trout, steelhead and salmon that are the stars of the streambed. Some of the fish in this stream are well worth a list, most of them are pretty pedestrian, and others only a mother could love.
Is the book worth reading? You bet, just look at how much it made me scratch my head. It got me frantically listing fish, reading long-forgotten journals, and making snide comments about his choices. Any book that gets you that fired up is always worth reading. He’s a good writer, and does a fine job with art and photography. You won’t mistake it for The Old Man and the Sea or A River Never Sleeps, but every meal can’t be spring chinook, and it is fun, informative and thought provoking. But stickleback? C’mon!
Bob Ellsberg’s column, Fishin’, appears monthly in RV Life and at rvlife.com.
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